Saturday, February 25, 2006

Ken Livingstone and the Jewish media

Ken Livingstone is the latest casualty of the unwritten rule of our times that freedom of speech ends where Jews get offended – and easily offended they do get. I’m glad they’ve picked on someone like Red Ken who doesn’t get intimidated or gives in at the first time of troubles and has vowed to fight this undemocratic censure of his elected position by an unelected committee who must either have thought that London does not need a mayor at all or that making the business of running London fall behind by a whole month was a small price to pay for appeasing the sensitivities of an arrogant Jewish reporter from the Evening Standard.

The laws and processes underpinning present-day thought-control are right out of the literary world of Kafka, a Jewish author whose dry and witty style I love and admire. Maybe it takes one to know one, for he was a member of the legal profession himself. With their shameless impunity these upholders of the public order don’t even seem to blush at the ever more apparent contradictions in their position. It is a cardinal sin to liken a pushy reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard, yet it is perfectly respectable to liken the whole body of Islam regularly to Nazism as many editorials of the larger broadsheets have done for many years, or to equate Muslims with terrorists and caricature their beloved prophet with a bomb in his turban. Jews may get offended at the slightest notch, but Muslims, you can kick them while they’re down.

Prince Harry had to apologise for wearing a Nazi outfit at a fancy dress party. Nobody would have batted an eyelid had he dressed up as Stalin instead. One cannot even point out that Stalin was personally responsible for more deaths than Hitler, since this would potentially undermine the sanctity of the Holocaust and make one fall foul of the thought-crime laws which just landed David Irving in prison in Austria and have put scores of people behind bars in Germany.

What’s different now is that the persecution is no longer hushed as it used to be. Jewish power has come out of the closet (I should really say Zionist, because the real Jews distaste this abominable behaviour by those who have hijacked their name). One tenth of Londoners are Muslim, yet their Mayor is suspended for offending the sensibilities of Jews who number less than half a percent of its population. Nationwide, Jews are half a percent of the British population whilst Muslims, according to the latest census, are edging towards three percent or six-fold their number. Yet there are Jews on the front bench of every parliamentary party whilst Muslims only supply a handful of Brown-Sahebs eagerly apologising for every anti-Islamic measure the government implements. But if you believe the media, amongst whose pundits Jews are equally notorious through their presence as Muslims are through their absence, it is the Jews who are the beleaguered and threatened minority.

Muslims have previously been criticised for too vociferously demanding certain rights, although generally they have no protection under the law as demonstrated by recent acquittal of Nick Griffin who cleverly redesigned the BNP’s racist stance into an anti-Islamic one to stay within the law. It is true that when minorities demand – and get – an influence above their numerical weight and contribution there is generally resentment amongst the rest of the population, leading to conflict. If this holds true for Muslims in some areas, it must certainly hold true for the minority belonging of British Jews. By boldly displaying their power to control they invite a backlash. Maybe the panel who censored the mayor of London should be prosecuted for incitement of anti-Semitism.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Our Boys Can Do No Wrong

British defence secretary John Reid is a true Labour man, defending the underdog (or is it the British Bulldog?). When the public was made aware of the superior people skills of British Marines who went out to pick up unarmed Iraqi youths after a demonstration (oops, sorry: riot, must get the terminology right), took them to their compound and proceeded to beat and kick them senseless, Reid asked the public for some more understanding – no, not for the poor youths being beaten up, but for the soldiers doing the beating. They were doing a difficult job in difficult circumstances.

Now I agree with John Reid that it cannot be easy to be posted as a soldier of an illegal army of occupation to a place where you’re not wanted, but that’s not what he meant. He was peddling the old Labour mantra that we are all the result of social conditioning and therefore not entirely responsible for our actions. It’s the environment, stupid. So in spite of all the training they receive, when British soldiers get frustrated and can’t take the heat (literally), they just can’t help themselves, they have to kick ass and beat up some little kids. We shouldn’t be condemning them so readily.

American defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld should learn from such British wisdom. The whole negative publicity of Abu Ghuraib could easily have been prevented had he only explained to the American public early on that those abuses at the American prison camp weren’t really some form of torture intended to humiliate the Arabs. Far from it – when those poor American GI’s have been so far away from home for so long, and seeing that the local maidens did not welcome them with flowers as promised, they just can’t help themselves, they have to live out their sexual fantasies some way or other. Now the logical conclusion of all this sociology must surely be that we should bring our boys home and give them therapy. I’m pretty sure that when regional councils in Southern Iraq ended their cooperation with the British army after the video was made public, it was for such compassionate reasons.

Nearer home there was another case of the Our-Boys-Can-Do-No-Wrong syndrome. The Crown Prosecution is taking the unprecedented step of charging police officers with a crime, but wait for it: the crime is not the cold blooded murder of an innocent Brazilian on the London underground. The crime these officers are accused of is having tried to pass the buck. Special branch wanted to wash their hands from the murky business they regularly are involved in and place all blame squarely onto the individual firearms officers, so they conveniently altered the logbooks. Now this is unforgivable: If you have to execute an innocent man, at least stand by it. What would the world come to otherwise?

Friday, February 17, 2006

Green fields, brown fields and airfields

The UK government, lead by deputy prime minister Prescott, wants to turn Britain into an urban wasteland by building more and more houses to meet the demand from new demographics (family break-up, single person households) and continuing immigration (mainly from Eastern Europe) to complement the workforce since the UK population is ageing and pension funds are already becoming depleted.

One obstacle has been the opposition by environmental campaigners who do not wish to see the countryside destroyed. Hence, the government encourages building on brown sites rather than freshly developing green sites. Developers do not like such restrictions and it seems that the government has now found a way of helping them by simply declaring green sites as brown sites.

The government’s most recent planning policy statement (PPS3) states that previously developed brown sites should be considered for housing developments. When defining brown sites certain facilities were excluded, namely hospital sites and airfield. In a revised draft of the planning policy statement the airfield example has been removed. As this change is tugged away in an annex it would hardly be noticed, but thanks to someone in the aviation world spotting it they are now up in arms.

Airfields are locations with previous development, namely a runway, a tower and a few hangars, but otherwise surrounded by ample green land. As build-up areas are not good for safety in the immediate vicinity of an airfield and as residents would probably start complaining of noise, airfields were hitherto unavailable for developers. With this sneaky change in the policy statement they are becoming a target and many small airfields used for flight training and recreational flying could be lost to make room for urbanisation.

For more read http://www.loop.aero/

People who do not wish to see airfields disappear from the UK countryside should urgently write to their MP, as the consultation period is running out, and copy the letter to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Planning Policies Division (2), Zone 4/J5, Eland House, Bressenden Place, London SW1E 5DU, email: pps3consultation@odpm.gsi.gov.uk

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Fighting for the rights of others

The British government is having its way with ID cards as the opposition to the ludicrous scheme has died down, a leaked UN report on evidence of torture in Guantanamo Bay is hardly making waves, a video showing British soldiers in Iraq having fun with kicking young protesters senseless is not raising many eyebrows, and preparations for an attack on Iran are continuing unabated. Meanwhile, cartoons are all the rage.

Muslims, unfortunately, are still busy organising marches to protest the abuse of freedom of speech, and thereby providing the distraction and diversion desired by the perpetrators of the above-mentioned infinitely more serious abuses of people and their liberties. It is ironic that it was Danish Muslims who played into the hands of the provocateurs since they are not exactly known for being too meticulous about their Islamic duties. For many years Denmark exported stunned meat certified by Danish Muslim organisations as “halal” to all corners of the world to complement their revenue from Danish bacon.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since the days of the Rushdie affair. Labour, with Muslim support, came to power in Britain and re-kindled the colonial adventure. In return for their unwavering blind support the Labour government turned Muslims into the outcast threat and danger from within. Muslim organisations latched on to a few popular causes like the demonstrations organised by the anti-war movement in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and supporting Galloway’s break-away party when he was thrown out of Labour. But on the whole they have learnt little and hardly left a mark of their own.

When in 1989 the Islamic Party of Britain was set up out of a realisation for the need of Muslim political involvement and in the hope that the post-immigrant generation of Muslims in Britain would be mature enough to provide political leadership for a country increasingly without direction those hopes were soon dashed when the Muslims of Bradford elected the very first Mormon MP into parliament for Labour in preference over his Islamic Party rival. The party gradually downscaled from a potential movement to a think tank, and British Muslims are still paying the price of this failure to turn things around.

When it comes to standing up for one’s convictions and fighting for the rights of others the situation remains that enlightened and principled non-Muslims will stick their necks out to defend Muslim causes, whereas opportunistic and naïve Muslims continue to hope for favours and hand-outs. The former British ambassador Craig Murray is one such brave man standing up to the steamrolling power of the establishment: He is defying state censorship to exercise his freedom of speech by publishing his book “Murder in Samarkand” about British and American collusion in abhorrent human rights abuses against Muslims in Uzbekistan. I doubt whether British Muslims are going to get excited about problems so far away – there is another demo about cartoons being planned for next weekend.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Politicians and media are still in denial

There is no two ways about it: Labour lost. The by-election result in the Scottish constituency of Dunfermline and West Fife is sending a clear message, and not just to Labour. The Liberal Democrats overturned a comfortable majority in spite of their recent leadership difficulties and public relations disaster. This by-election might mark the end of spin, the practice of replacing hard facts and political programmes with clever sound bites from advertising specialists which “New” Labour introduced in an imitation of American-style politics.

Since Labour launched re-launched itself with the help of PR under the song theme “it can only get better” they started believing their own rhetoric. The media adjusted and turned from critical analysis to becoming the mouthpieces of their preferred party, with the Sun, for example, switching from Tory to Labour. Sun readers might not be discerning enough to notice the difference, but neither did the rest of the population when the policies of the leading parties all started looking very much alike. They forgot the old Lincoln quote that “you may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”.

The political and media establishment are still in denial. This by-election might eventually help them realise that the political realities they conjure in their PR propaganda and tendentious reporting are about as real as the so-called Big Brother “reality show”. People may watch and be fascinated, but they know only too well that it is all concocted and doesn’t actually represent the lives they experience themselves. You can tell people that you never had it so good, or that the economy is forever growing and booming, or that the only thing they ever have to fear in their lives is to be taken hostage by an agent of al-Qaida Inc. Their worries about keeping up with mortgage payments, the inability to obtain an appointment at their local doctor’s, the run-down of services, however, will ultimately put the lie to all those attempts of persuasion.

In the Scottish by-election the Tories failed abysmally in spite of all the media attempts to smooth the new neocon Cameron into the position of best-loved politician of all times. It is hard for the Tories to shake of the uncaring Thatcher image. Discrediting Kennedy, an opponent of the Iraq war, and trying to replace him with right-wing substitute Oaten did not work either. Notwithstanding the constant pressure exerted by the gay lobby, the public did not approve of a homosexual in high office. Yet, as the election results show, this did not demolish the parties standing as the only viable alternative to the two complementary options of increasingly non-democratic Socialists and increasingly freedom-hating Conservatives, both of whom are in the pockets of big money. The vote went to the Liberals partly because they had not yet been able to betray voters whilst running the government.

There are numerous other issues where the mainstream media and politicians are woefully out of touch. The recent debacle about freedom of speech is one of them. Joe Blogs is quite capable of differentiating between a worthwhile contribution and an uncalled for insult. There is little chance that this contrived episode will help swing the British people behind the imminent war against Iran either. When given a chance, people will vent their frustration. Unfortunately, there is hitherto no adequate channel for their voices to be heard. Politicians, PR executives and media hacks would, nonetheless, be well advised to spend more time talking to their taxi drivers than listening to their own circles. It might help them catch up with reality.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Suicide bomber tasteless but not offensive

The media have just scored a serious own-goal and society has displayed its double-standards when Omar Khayam was returned to prison for his part in a demonstration against the publication of blasphemous cartoons depicting the prophet and his followers as suicide bombers. The young 22-year old had served a sentence for drug dealing and was released on licence, since it is customary in the UK that offenders only serve half the sentence given to them by court and are then paroled.
The prime minister stated that police would have the government's full support "in any prosecutions they mount", saying "it is very important for our overall good relations in this country that people understand there's no political correctness that should keep the police from taking whatever action they think is necessary and that is my position 100%." Hang on a minute.
What was the crime that this young man committed? Dressing up as a suicide bomber? It may be tasteless to do so and hurt the feelings of people, but seeing he didn’t carry a real bomb it sure wasn’t something they shouldn’t be expected to cope with if we’re talking about so-called freedom of speech and the right to satirise. Were not the cartoons depicting the prophet of Islam as a bomb-carrying fanatic equally tasteless? Did they not hurt the feelings of a billion people who love their prophet as dearly as their own parents or even more so? Khayam may have lacked the responsible maturity in failing to realise the sensitivities of people affected by the way he expressed his opinion, but can we expect a young fellow his age to act more responsible than many of the editors of European newspapers?
The cartoon printed in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten was not an expression of freedom of speech, it was a deliberate attempt to provoke Muslims. The same paper had rejected cartoons making fun of Jesus on the grounds that they might offend readers. A cartoon depicting the Queen as an evil monster sending princess Diana onto her fatal final car journey would, I am sure, also be punished by the courts as disrespectful and offensive. Europe’s reaction to Muslim objections and protests following the anti-Muslim cartoons has only demonstrated what was already known to Muslims long ago: that there is a deep-seated hatred of Islam and Muslims in media circles who, probably for the benefit of their Zionist paymasters, want to demonise Muslims in the public eye. They consider it their right to poke fun at others, but lament when faced with a taste of their own medicine.
No amount of reasoning and debate can put the cat back into the bag or the genie into the bottle. The establishment have come out and shown their colours. Europe is a post-Christian club still defined by the attitudes of the crusades. Liberal secularists are no neutral do-gooders, they come from the same colonialist and xenophobic stable as their crusading ancestors. The crusades eventually failed and civilisation, from coffee to medicine and science, was finally allowed to enter Europe ending the tyranny of the Church. The new tyranny of the money changers whom Jesus threw out of the Jewish temples followed. If Muslims wake up to the fact that the whole power of Western nations is based on fictitious debt finance, Europe might once more see the light of civilisation.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

The whole world has become a cartoon

War is being waged against Muslims on numerous battlefields, and for Muslims to turn their attention away from their plight to the merits or otherwise of a cartoon or two in a Western paper is utter folly. Sadly, today’s Muslims always rise to provocation and when doing so rarely consider their response beforehand so that their reaction appears all emotional. A re-run of the Satanic Voices scenario the purpose of which is skilfully discussed in the intellectual response given in the book Satanic Voices by Islamic Party of Britain leader David Musa Pidcock.

If secularists want to insult and challenge God let them play with fire and get burned. In this respect the Muslim response should be modelled on that of Abdul Mutalib who negotiated the return of his seized camels with Abraha, the Yemeni general who was leading his army with an elephant to attack the Kaabah, the holy house in Makkah: “Let the Lord of the Kaabah look after His house, I shall look after my camels”. Let the Muslims of today defend their people first.

There is no doubt that the offensive cartoons are part of the propaganda which accompanies warfare. They serve to ridicule and humiliate the enemy. They are no innocent expressions of so-called freedom of speech. Muslims nations were therefore right to withdraw their ambassadors, but will they do the same now that other, more powerful nations than Denmark, have joined the fray?

Western media only defend freedom of speech when it suits them. Let the editors of Jyllands Posten, France Soir or Die Welt publish a cartoon ridiculing Jews. We all know they won’t. Prince Harry had to publicly apologize for wearing a Nazi uniform at a fancy dress party. Let the Arab press publish front page cartoons about gas supplies running low due to the stream of Jews entering German camps instead of cartoons about virgins running out due to a stream of suicide bombers, and watch how Western countries would withdraw their ambassadors and threaten sanctions. The editor of Die Welt waffles about the right to cause offence and satirise religion when his country imprisons people for the merely scientific questioning of facts relating to the Holocaust. The German chancellor Merkel wanted the Iranian president Ahmedinejad censored as an outlaw for stating that Israel was illegitimate and that if Europeans wanted to atone for the Holocaust they should give the Jews some of their own territory instead of making the Arabs pay the price. Freedom of speech? There are so many contradictions, the whole world is beginning to look like a cartoon.

The provocative cartoons were intended as an attack against Muslims and that which they hold sacred. Art cannot be taken as an excuse for abuse. When Muslims boycotted Danish goods and when the Egyptian owner of the French newspaper France Soir sacked his editor, those were the right responses. They were saying to the perpetrators: Put your money where your mouth is, attack us if you want to, but be prepared to pay the price. The Jewish lobby have very successfully ostracised anybody whose anti-Zionist views they did not like as anti-Semitic and ensured corresponding sanctions. Let the Muslims do the same.

Western economies would collapse if Muslim governments would collectively challenge them on how much they were willing to pay for the price of their secular freedom of speech or freedom to insult. They would quickly learn that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. How about a “cartoon levy” on fuel to be used to restore the image of Islam? Western governments succumb to China’s demands for censorship because their principles only go skin-deep when it comes to business.

Western demagogues only provoke Islam because they know that Muslim governments are spineless and that their protestations are nothing but hot air. Nobody defended the right of French Muslim women to wear their scarves. Nobody challenged Europe when its court denied Turkish women the same right. Will they now withdraw their ambassadors from France and Germany? Unlikely - and this is why those countries felt they had to come to the aid of the beleaguered Danes. They know that if they stand together, Muslims will be divided.

When the United States prepared to attack Iraq they first softened up their target by words and economic sanctions. Since then they have put all of Islam into their sights and hope to destroy one Muslim nation after the other. Maybe their cartoons have spelt this fact out more clearly and maybe they can provide a wake-up and rallying call for Muslims the world over, but only if it is clearly understood that you don’t defend God or his prophet by continuing to do business with their enemies.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Britain’s new state religion

It is official: you can insult or ridicule a religion and cause distress to its followers with impunity. The law will protect this behaviour as an exercise of the right to free speech. I never supported the new legislation to outlaw religious discrimination and incitement to hatred, suspecting that it was more likely to be used against Muslims rather than to protect them. But that is beside the point. It remains a fact that Muslims are the only religious community not protected under British law. Other religions manage to take cover under the race relations legislation and Christianity has the blasphemy laws.

The legal landscape in Britain is becoming increasingly bizarre: Yesterday the conviction of a young Muslim law student was confirmed of having caused distress to a police officer by calling him racist. You must not ridicule or insult a police officer. You must not criticise the system. Yet you can ridicule and insult the religious identity of billions of people world-wide without impunity. Nothing is sacred in Britain except the British state itself and its institutions.

The Universal Declaration of Human rights, that grand holy text of secular society, has in its short half-a-century history been eroded beyond recognition because of the unwillingness of secularists to afford people with religious beliefs the same rights and protection as themselves. Article 2 sets out that the rights declared should be the entitlement of all without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. We all know this to be a farce when a British Home Office minister can publicly pronounce that people of Asian or Muslim origin should expect to be singled out during stop and search procedures.

Article 5 states that no-one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition spring readily to mind. Article 7’s equal protection before the law does not apply to those detained under suspicion of terrorism on the basis of secret evidence and who do not have an effective remedy to fight the violation of their fundamental rights as postulated in article 8. When article 9 says that no-one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile, we can all laugh out loud. Article 10 about the entitlement to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him does not apply to detainees either.

Even MPs are no longer protected under article 12 demanding that no-one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, since MI5 now also wants to intercept their communications. Article 18 postulates that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. Muslim women in France or Turkey will read this with amazement when there right to an education granted in article 26 is denied to them on account of manifesting their religion by wearing a head scarf.

I’ve only mentioned a third of the totality of articles in this document hailed by the secularists as one of their greatest achievements, and I could go on demolishing another third as by now meaningless and irrelevant platitudes that governments only pay lip service to. Those governments still use human rights as a stick to beat other countries with when criticising their human rights record, but get very touchy when challenged on their own behaviour. The simple fact is that authority is based on power, and power corrupts.

Britain is no longer a Christian country. Having curbed the influence of the church the secular establishment resist that any other religion should be allowed to take hold to any degree. As secularism and liberalism resent being portrayed as substitute religions, the new object of worship becomes authority itself. Just like in the days of the pharaohs and god kings, authority is sacred. If a police officer harasses you, you are expected to be grateful for receiving attention by this representative of the state. To call him a racist is tantamount to blasphemy.